The song Tom Petty considered a chore to write
The worst thing that you can do to a songwriter is make the writing feel like a chore. Inspiration always comes naturally; if you try to make something come by force, it tends to feel like pulling teeth every time you try to put pen to paper. Although Tom Petty would struggle under pressure trying to get songs made, he ended up writing one of his most beloved deep cuts after being talked into writing it.
Before he had even made it with the Heartbreakers, Petty had already amassed a strong collection of classic songs under his belt. Working with his pre-fame band Mudcrutch, Petty was already holding onto tracks like ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’, eventually dusting it off when working on the band’s third album, Damn the Torpedoes.
While he would often let the songs come to him, he eventually got put in his place when working on his first album with Denny Cordell. After coming in one day with only one great tune, Cordell’s disappointment in not having anything else led to him reading Petty the riot act, saying that he needed to come in with some kind of tune every time he walked into the studio.
After the band started to gain some momentum from the strength of their debut, Petty had to start making the next album as fast as possible. Since he had used all of his bulletproof hooks on the first record, You’re Gonna Get It felt slightly slapdash compared to its predecessor, featuring tunes that would have worked better as live jams than studio cuts.
Out of all the wonderful rock tunes on the record, Petty wrote a beautiful ballad entitled ‘Magnolia’, telling the story of a woman that he let get away when he was on the road. So, how did Petty go about writing one of his most overlooked ballads? Simple…desperation.
Before he had thought to write the song for his own record, Petty was looking to shop songs around to different people before meeting Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn. Wanting to collaborate with his idol, Petty was only given a few hours to develop the song.
When discussing the material with Paul Zollo, Petty talked about how he had to force himself to write, saying, “I wrote it in [manager] Tony Dimitriades’s apartment. It was one of those situations where Tony said, ‘You need to write a song for Roger McGuinn. I’ll be back in a few hours’. I just made myself write a song. I wrote it with Roger in mind…maybe to a fault”.
While Petty would say that he didn’t think that highly of the tune, it was one of the few instances of dysfunctional love songs that would become a staple of his later work like Echo. Given how much was put into this one song, it’s fitting that Petty wanted to title the album Terminal Romance before settling on the hard-rocking title track as the album statement.
Still, ‘Magnolia’ is a great piece of heartland rock that foreshadowed where Petty would be going in the next few years. Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan may have been making their own version of street poetry, but the heartland began opening up the minute that this song started playing.
